


Troubled by Dreams

by Emjen_Enla



Series: Prompted Works [24]
Category: The Folk of the Air - Holly Black
Genre: Book 2: The Wicked King, Cardan confuses me, Character gets insulted by their own subconscious, Cross-Posted on Tumblr, Dreams and Nightmares, F/M, Hopefully all my questions will get answered in QoN, Implied/Referenced Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-28
Updated: 2019-08-28
Packaged: 2020-09-28 09:43:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,329
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20423885
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Emjen_Enla/pseuds/Emjen_Enla
Summary: “I have too often been troubled by dreams of Jude...her face features prominently in my most frequent nightmare." Or the one where Cardan dreams of Jude. Too bad his subconscious is using her as a voice box.





	Troubled by Dreams

**Author's Note:**

> Who knows if I actually managed to write Cardan in character; he confuses me and until this point I’ve never actually written in his POV. Jude is deliberately OOC, but that’s because technically she’s not in this fic…
> 
> Per usual, I’m not sure if this what the requester wanted and I’m not convinced this is a valid explanation for this line, but hopefully you all enjoy it anyway.
> 
> My writing blog is on Tumblr @emjenwrites if you want to come over prompt me (I say like I don't have five million other projects to be working on).

Cardan woke up.

He was lying in a heap in the corner of the throne room, mostly hidden behind a poorly placed table. This was how he’d awoken the night that Balekin had murdered their family and attempted to take the crown for himself. Cardan dreamed about this more than he was willing to admit. It wasn’t like he’d been particularly close to any of his family (after all most of them had hated him for one reason or another) but that didn’t mean that passing out from too much to drink and then waking up to find that your whole family had been brutally slaughtered wasn’t traumatic. It was probably enough to give anyone nightmares.

Since this was not the first time this had happened, Cardan immediately closed his eyes again. Maybe if he just didn’t get up and look he wouldn’t have to see Balekin standing over the bloody bodies of Elowyn and Caelia and Rhyia and Dain and Eldred. He really never needed to see that again.

“You’re really going to lie there like a drunk lump?” Balekin asked from over him. Cardan squeezed his eyes even more tightly closed. Anytime this dream wanted to end was fine with him.

Balekin kicked Cardan’s leg. “You’re pathetic,” he said. “You lie here drunk and failing just like I always said you would. I was right about you. You drink your life away while that mortal takes everything from you.”

Cardan’s eyes finally snapped open as he realized where this was going.  _ No. _ he thought.  _ Not again. _

“Cardan,” Jude said. “Are you conscious yet? Where are you?”

Slowly Cardan sat up and reached for the table top to pull himself up. Balekin was gone though Cardan couldn’t remember when he’d vanished. What would he see when he faced Jude tonight? He dreamed about Jude all the time and most of the time these dreams were at the very least somewhat anxiety inducing. Some nights she attacked him and pinned him to the ground with a knife to his throat. Some nights she kissed him until he couldn’t breathe and that was almost as worrying. Which would it be today?

He stepped around the corner of the table and took in the throne room. His family’s bodies lay across the floor in bloody, gruesome piles. Cardan’s stomach turned over and he tried to look away but there was not a clean place to look. There had not been this much blood at the time; his subconscious was exaggerating.

“How many times are you going to be unconscious while they die?” Jude asked.

Cardan looked up at her. His throne was sitting on the dias where Balekin had murdered the rest of their family and Jude was sitting in it. She was dressed in the raven-feather coat he’d been wearing the night all of this had happened. The crown of Elfhame sat on her head. She looked down her nose at him.

“You’re pathetic, you know,” she said. “You’ve been drunk for every major event of your life and then for everything else of minor importance that’s happened in between.”

Logically, he knew that dream-Jude was not real-Jude and that real-Jude would never say something like that to his face. He wasn’t sure if that meant she didn’t feel it. He was never sure what Jude felt. He wished he could accurately tell when she was lying but he couldn’t. He’d heard humans tended to have “tells” when they lied, but he didn’t know enough about lying to know what sort of things a tell could be let alone what Jude’s were.

“I have some tasks for you,” Jude said. Her shoulders were tense in the way that they always were when she was preparing to command him. She didn’t appear to realize her hesitancy to control him was so obvious.

“You don’t have to command me,” Cardan protested. “You could just ask me.” He didn’t say  _ “I know that you don’t like doing it. I know that you’re uncomfortable with having this much power over me, even if you won’t admit it to yourself.” _ He didn’t think dream-Jude would react any better to that than real-Jude would.

Jude snorted. “We both know that’s not true. The instant I trust you, you’ll stab me in the back with a smile on your lips.”

“That’s not true,” Cardan said. “You can trust me; I want you to trust me.” In real life the fact that he could say that would have meant something but in a dream it didn’t seem to.

“You know, it’s almost funny how easily it was to take control of you,” Jude said. The voice was her own but the words were Balekin’s. “You’re faerie; you should have been able to keep one stupid human from manipulating you. You are no king; you are a fraud and a failure.”

It shouldn’t have hurt as much as it did. Cardan knew he wasn’t king now. He was Jude’s figurehead. He wished there was some way to prove to Jude that he trusted her enough to do what she wanted without her having to command him. He could be a figurehead; but he didn’t like being a puppet.

“I want you to trust me,” he repeated though he knew Jude’s dream self was even less likely to believe him than her real self was. Because he knew it was a dream he was able to say something he would never let himself say in real life, “I think I might be in love with you.”

Dream-Jude looked down her nose at him. “And what makes you think I care?”

~~~~

Cardan woke up.

He was lying in a heap on the floor again, surrounded by the detritus of yet a different party. Other sleeping faeries littered the room like bloodless bodies. Locke had always been good at planning parties, but he’d been outdoing himself recently. Cardan knew it was making Jude nervous, but he wasn’t worrying about it. He loved a good party.

Slowly he sat up. His mouth was dry and his head ached which was probably somewhat impressive: it took a lot of wine to give a faerie a hangover. If he had actually cared he might have considered whether his current lifestyle was healthy, but he didn’t care so he didn’t.

“Nightmare?”

Cardan turned to see Locke sprawled on a heap of cushions which appeared to have been pilfered from somewhere during the party. A mortal girl with brown hair was curled up on the floor by his feet. Taryn. In the darkness she looked so much like Jude that Cardan’s heart leaped before common sense took over. Locke was watching him piercingly. Cardan couldn’t lie and say he hadn’t had a nightmare so he said nothing at all.

“You were muttering,” Locke said after a while. “What were you dreaming about? Or rather; who?”

“My dreams are my own business,” Cardan said voice even. “For all you know I could have been dreaming about giant purple toadstools.”

“You could have been,” Locke admitted. “But we both know you weren’t.”

Cardan couldn’t deny it. He watched Locke, keeping his expression carefully neutral. He hadn’t trusted Locke in a long time but Locke was the sort of person you needed to keep close and carefully point in the direction of your enemies to keep from being targeted yourself. On closer reflection, Cardan admitted that most of the people he knew were like that. Perhaps he should endeavour to find some more suitable friends, but he knew he would never try. Cardan was not oblivious to what was good behavior and what was good for him; he simply didn’t care. He’d lived this way too long to consider changing it now.

“You can keep your secrets all you want, Cardan,” Locke said, picking up a goblet from the floor and taking a sip while staring over the rim at Cardan. “We both know I’ll know them all eventually anyway.”


End file.
